Rist

A character level beside the skills, carved into runestones you choose and deepen.

Built against the installed game (0.221.12, Unity 6000.0.61, BepInEx 5.4.23.3, Harmony 2.9). Single DLL plus a text file, no asset bundle.

What it is

Valheim has skills but no character level. Rist adds one that runs alongside the skill system: vanilla skills are read, never written, never rescaled, never reskinned.

Every character level earns one pick. Spend it on any runestone in the catalogue and that runestone gains a rank, up to five. Picks bank: nothing expires, and the panel waits.

There are no drawbacks. A runestone is a reward or it is nothing.

The panel

A fifth tab on the compendium bar, beside the raven and the trophy, opens a full screen of runestones - one per rist. Each carries its own outline, its own rock and its own runes, all seeded off the runestone id, so a rist looks the same in every session and on every machine: the stone is part of how you recognise it.

A rank cuts one more mark into the rim, and the mark holds the level that bought it. Five ranks, five marks, five answers to "when did I get this". The column beside the field follows the cursor and says what a stone is worth now, what the next rank would make it, and what waits at the bottom of its track.

Three designs came before it: a draft window dealing three at random, a board of tiles, and that same board dressed in the game's own wooden sprites. The last is why this one exists. Borrowing a window frame is imitation, and it read as a different game no matter how close the sprites got - IMGUI cannot draw with the game's shaders, so every copied sprite had to survive a colour space round trip that was guessed wrong three times. A runestone imitates nothing: it is Valheim's own subject matter, it is a shape rather than a material, and the marks cut into it are text in the game's own rune face.

XP

Skill level-ups, and nothing else. Nearly every activity in Valheim raises some skill, so building, sneaking, sailing, cooking and fishing all pay in without this mod maintaining a table of what counts.

XP is weighted by the skill level reached, not flat per level-up. Vanilla's own skill cost curve is pow(level+1, 1.5), so early levels are nearly free. A flat rate would rain runestones in the first hours and dry up exactly when the deep ranks start to matter, and would make grinding a fresh cheap skill from zero the fastest way to farm picks.

And weighted by which skill

Not every skill equally, though. Chopping trees is safe, unlimited and available from the first minute, and on the live server it was buying half a character's level on its own - 666 XP of 1346, against 293 for everything earned in a fight. SkillWeights prices that:

Weight	Skills
1	Swords, Knives, Clubs, Polearms, Spears, Axes, Bows, Crossbows, Unarmed, Blocking, ElementalMagic, BloodMagic
0.5	Dodge, Sneak, Swim
0.25	WoodCutting, Pickaxes, Crafting, Farming, Cooking, Fishing, Run, Jump, Ride

The principle is risk: full price for a skill raised by something that can kill you, half for one that is situational, a quarter for repetition that cannot hurt you. That same character comes out at level 6 rather than 12, with over half of it earned fighting.

The weights are a table you are meant to edit, and they sync from the host, so a server sets them for everyone on it. Why the level curve itself could not have done this job is in DESIGN.md.

Re-pricing a character that already exists

Changing the weights affects new XP only, which would leave everyone already playing carrying a level bought at the old prices. WeightGeneration is the way out: bump it to any different text and every character is recomputed once, on its next login, from the skill levels this server watched it reach.

Runestones already taken are kept. A character re-priced from level 12 to level 6 holds all twelve, and earns no new pick until it passes twelve again.

Dying no longer costs skill progress

Valheim already has a world modifier for this and it is not enough. Skills.OnDeath calls LowerAllSkills(m_DeathLowerFactor * Game.m_skillReductionRate), and inside that method only the level loss is scaled by the factor:

m_level -= m_level * factor;   // scaled: zero factor means no loss
m_accumulator = 0f;            // NOT scaled: always wiped
// ...and "$msg_skills_lowered" is shown regardless

Setting the world's skill reduction to zero therefore still throws away partial progress toward the next level in every skill, and still announces that skills were lowered. On a skill in the seventies, where one level is a long grind, the accumulator is the part that actually hurts. Rist skips the method, which removes all three together.

The bar

The experience bar is a clone of one of the game's own upright bars, the eitr bar, so it carries the real frame, track and fill sprites at whatever HUD scale you have set, drains rather than snapping to empty on a level-up, and flashes while a pick is waiting. If a game update ever breaks the clone it falls back to a plain drawn bar rather than to an empty corner.

Joining a server

Progress is kept on the server, keyed by the platform identity of the connection and the character being played. Valheim characters are client-side files, so anything stored on the character is editable by its owner, which rules it out for something that decides rewards.

A joining character is credited for the skills it already carries, so it arrives at the level those skills are worth with the picks to spend. That is CreditExistingSkills, on by default; turn it off and only XP earned on that server counts. It is a per-server setting, synced from the host.

Crediting has a plain cost: a maxed vanilla character walks in at Rist level 219 and takes the whole catalogue. The answer to that is not to withhold XP from it, it is to not let it in, which is Dyrr's job rather than this mod's.

Skill reports come from the client and cannot be verified, so three ceilings bound what a claim can be worth: how many are accepted, how much one may say, and how much anything can be worth over time. None of it detects a cheat, it bounds one, and it withholds rather than punishes.

Singleplayer works with no special casing and the ceilings are inert there.

Runestones

cards.txt sits beside the DLL. One runestone per line:

id | Name | flavour text | effect | value-per-rank

effect is the literal name of a public float field on the game's own SE_Stats. That is what makes the catalogue a text file rather than a switch statement: Valheim already sums about forty-five of these across active status effects (carry weight, armour, the six stamina costs, stealth, fall damage, regen rates, skill gain) so naming one turns it into a runestone with no code change and no rebuild.

*inventoryrow is the single special, because grid height is not a stat.

An unknown field name is logged and skipped, not thrown, matching how the game treats a prefab name that does not resolve. A typo costs one runestone, not the catalogue.

Core is optional, and here is exactly what that costs

Rist installs and runs on its own. Core is a soft dependency: install Rist by itself and it works, including the extra inventory rows. Solo, you need nothing else and give up nothing.

On a server it is a different question, and Rist gives up more without Core than the rest of this suite does. Three things, all of which matter only in multiplayer:

The catalogue is no longer checked. cards.txt names what every rank is worth, effects are applied client-side from it, and the server only ever verifies the rank, so an edited line is simply believed. With Core, a hash of the file travels in the version handshake and two ends running the same build over different catalogues get reported. Without it, a client that edits cards.txt gets whatever it wrote.

The host's curve is no longer forced. LevelBaseXp and the rest are synced from the host with Core. Without it, a client with different settings reads a different level out of the same XP, and every number on its screen disagrees with the server deciding them. The .cfg files have to be matched by hand.

Extra inventory rows are claimed without an arbiter. This is the one worth reading twice. Inventory.m_height is a single private int with no owner. Two mods that both want extra rows each write it, the last writer wins, and a mod that only writes when its own state changes loses silently to one that writes every frame. Core exists to add every claim up and write once, so mods stack instead of fighting. Standalone Rist owns that write alone, correct on its own, and in conflict with any other mod that grants inventory rows, with the winner decided by frame ordering rather than by anything either mod can control. If you run another row-adding mod, install Core.

What is not given up is correctness of the rows themselves. The standalone owner carries the Player.Load widening in full, which is not a nicety: without it every item sitting in a granted row is destroyed by loading the game, silently, because AddItem drops any saved position outside the current grid and the row is not applied until after the load. That bug cost a real heartwood to find, and the fallback would not have shipped without the fix.

Rist logs a warning at startup when it starts without Core, naming all three.

Config

BepInEx\config\ezomic.valheim.rist.cfg

Key	Default	What it does
Enabled	true	Off keeps records but stops granting and applying
XpPerSkillLevel	1	XP per skill-up, multiplied by the level reached
LevelBaseXp	40	Cumulative XP for level 1
LevelExponent	1.4	Cumulative XP for level N is base × N^exponent
SkillWeights	see above	What each skill is worth toward the level, as Skill=multiplier pairs
DefaultSkillWeight	1	What a skill not named in SkillWeights is worth
WeightGeneration	1	Bump to re-price every character once under the current weights
MaxRank	5	How deep one runestone goes, and how many slots its track shows
BonusEvery	5	Ranks between capstones
ShowInfoTab	true	Add the rists tab to the compendium bar
RemoveDeathSkillLoss	true	Skip Skills.OnDeath
CheckSkillBaseline	true	Take a joining character's skills as the baseline it is paid from
CreditExistingSkills	true	Pay a joining character for the skills it already has; off counts only XP gained here
MaxSkillUpsPerMinute	30	Server-side ceiling on accepted reports per player
MaxSkillLevelJump	1	Levels above the baseline one report may claim
MaxXpPerMinute	600	XP paid per minute of connected time; 0 is off
XpBurst	1800	How much unspent allowance banks, so honest bursts still pay
Verbose	false	Log every grant, rejection and runestone applied
ShowXpBar	true	Show the experience bar at all
VanillaBar	true	Clone one of the game's own bars; off draws the plain fallback
BarFollowStamina	true	Anchor to the stamina bar; off falls back to BarPosX/BarPosY
BarOffsetX / BarOffsetY	0 / 70	Pixels right of and below the stamina bar's centre
BarPosX / BarPosY	172 / 105	Screen pixels to the centre, when not following
BarSize	240	Length in canvas units; 64 is a starting stamina bar
BarBuildRaise	155	Pixels to lift the bar while the build or ship panel is open
BarColour	4FB3A5	RRGGBB; the trailing fill is the same hue held back. E4DCC4 for bone
BarFlashSeconds	4	How often the bar flashes while a runestone is waiting
BarX / BarBottom / BarThickness / BarLength	168 / 75 / 10 / 60	Place the fallback bar only

A value already written to the .cfg beats a new default in code. Change the .cfg.

Status: v1.0

Runs on a listen host and on a dedicated server, and both halves have been exercised: the ledger, the gate, the pick path, the level curve, the panel, the bar and the compendium tab. Nineteen runestones, all of them verified to name a field the game actually reads.

What is not done is the part that only play settles. The curve has now been retuned twice off real play: from 60 * N^1.5 to 40 * N^1.4 when runestones stopped arriving, and then in 1.1.0 by weighting XP per skill, when the server's ledger showed half a character's level had come from chopping trees. Both were found by reading the ledger rather than by guessing, and there is no reason to think it has run out of things to say. No value in the runestone catalogue has been tuned against anything but reasoning. The version says the code is finished, not that the numbers are right.

Known gaps

• The shipping curve has never been played. Everything below it works; how often a stone lights up at 40 * N^1.4 is now measured against one session rather than reasoned about, but one session is not a playthrough. The panel, the bar and the tab have all been seen in game and are correct; this is about pacing, not about whether anything draws.
• Balance rests entirely on the runestones. With a free choice the strongest runestone is always available, so the ordering of MaxRank and the per-rank values are doing the work the random offer used to do. That has not been played hard enough to find out which one wins.
• Multiplayer has never had a second player. The ledger, the version gate, the config sync and the catalogue hash all work host-side and against a dev server, but no remote client has connected, so the join path is exercised only in the shape where the server is also the client.
• Ranks taken before ledger v3 have no level. The old format recorded a rank and nothing else, and picks were not stored in order, so there is no way to tell which level bought which rank. Those slots read a dash permanently. Everything taken since is exact.
• SE_Stats has no max health, stamina or eitr field - those come from food in Valheim - so no max-pool runestone is possible without a different vehicle.

Design notes

Why picks are chosen rather than dealt, why capacity is a capstone, how the bar is built out of a vanilla one, and why the ledger lives where it does: DESIGN.md.

Reporting bugs

The Discord is the fastest route, and the right one if you are not sure whether what you are seeing is a bug at all. Issues on the repo work too and suit anything long.

Bring BepInEx\LogOutput.log if you can, and say whether you were on a server or your own world. The log is most of the difference between a fix and a guess, and it is written every session whether or not anything went wrong.

Part of the Longhouse pack

This is one of the Longhouse pack, a pinned set of my mods that installs in one click and is what the Longhouse server runs. You do not need the pack to use this on its own, and nothing here behaves differently outside it.

The Discord is where the server lives if you want to play on it: small, EU, hard combat difficulty and everything else vanilla.

Author

Rist is an original mod by Robbin Thijssen (Thijssen Software). Copyright (c) 2026 Robbin Thijssen. MIT licensed. See LICENSE.